Customer Reviews

My Germany: A Jewish Writer Returns to the World His Parents Escaped

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Lev Raphael's latest book, My Germany, is a multifaceted tour de force that is at once shocking, compelling, informative and deeply moving. Raphael recounts his parents' horrific experiences as victims of the Holocaust. He delves into their unspeakable suffering as well as their triumphant survival. But Raphael goes beyond the atrocities of WWII. He explores the monumental impact of his parents' survivorship not only upon the victims themselves, but also upon their children. He paints a poignant, very personal portrait of what it is like to grow up in a house where ghosts of the past lurk in every corner. As he moves on in life, shadows of his parents' tragedies follow. In time, Raphael comes to cherish his Jewish heritage. He also finds love and embraces his gay identity. But it is not until he embarks upon a book tour throughout Germany that he truly faces, and conquers, his parents' demons.

Once in a great while, a book comes a long that imparts knowledge not only about the world around us, but also about the world within us. This is one such book. It is a rare treasure and a must-read for everyone.

I've read everything Lev Raphael has written over the years. I am Jewish, but my family has been in the US for three, four, and five generations, on both sides. Other than hearing from my mother, a teenager in Chicago during the late 30's/early 40's, about her family's attempts to help relatives flee Germany and Czechoslovakia, we were largely untouched by Hitler's Holocaust. However, I am a voracious reader of Holocaust literature,both fiction and non-fiction.

Raphael grew up with two survivors as parents. Nearly everything in daily life was touched on by his parents' experiences. And, as with most survivors' families, they firmly boycotted anything produced in Germany. Lev did not meet a German til he was in college. He had no interest in ever visiting Germany, and in fact didn't do so til he was invited to give a speech there about ten years ago.

But wanting to investigate his mother's experience as a slave laborer during the war, he hesitantly visited Germany a few times, and eventually found his mother's story. He also found friends in Germany among the "new generation" of Germans, born largely after the war and brought up with full knowledge, and acknowledgment, of their parents' and grandparents' misdeeds.

He began to feel at ease during his trips to Germany, often doing speaking engagements when his books were published in German.

Raphael writes a great story of how his old taboos were recognised, acknowledged, and then discarded. I don't think he would have been able to "discard", without an exhaustive "recognition" and "acknowledgment" of both his feelings and the facts of post-war Germany.

I could not put this book down. My background is similar to the author's. My parents are Jewish Holocaust Survivors. I experienced many of the same things in my traumatic childhood as he did. I grew up hating Germany and the German people for murdering my parents families in Poland and Czechoslovakia. In recent years, however, I have been re-examining my attitude toward Germany and, finally, emotionally and cognitively accepting that anyone born in Germany during and after the war are not to blame and don't deserve to be hated. In fact, as the author writes, this generation has also suffered greatly from the terrible guilt of their country's recent history.

I highly recommend Mr. Raphael's book. He's a wonderful writer.

Felicia P. Zieff

President

Association of Descendants of the Shoah (Holocaust) - Illinois

Chicago, IL, USA

In this moving and elegantly written memoir, Lev Raphael confronts the demons he inherited as being the son of Holocaust survivors. Fearful, skeptical, angry, and plain curious, he travels to Germany on book tours. He discovers that modern Germany is not his parents' Nazi Germany, the country mainly responsible for the horrors perpetrated on the Jewish people.

This is a balanced account. The author presents as much detail as he can regarding the agonies his parents and the European Jews suffered, particularly in Germany and because of Germany. As an academic, he has done extensive research in Holocaust Studies. As a Second Generation Survivor, he has attempted to document the lives of his parents as fully as possible. He articulately presents all the reasons why the Germans should never be forgiven for their unspeakable crimes.

Nevertheless, Lev Raphael unexpectedly discovered that he is at peace with Germany today. He half jokes that he is even able to buy a German coffee grinder without guilt. As a member of the second-generation myself, I fully identify with his struggles. His account is highly readable, in spite of what would seem to be heavy subject matter. This book should be in every German and every Jewish home.

Lev Raphael's varied and multi-layered work continues to delight and inform his readers. He is, by all accounts, the number one writer of the second generation of survivors. My Germany is a book unique in approach and material. The story of Raphael's book tour in Germany, it engrosses the reader in history, loss, forgiveness and Raphael's legendary sense of play. His search for his feared and adored mother graces the book tour so that it becomes no mere travelogue but a story of mourning and love. If for nothing else than the mesmerizing tale of his lecture back here in New York before a hostile audience, do read this book. Raphael learns one of the great lessons of history: Revenge is sweet, so sweet, and hardly worth abandoning for sensitivity, forgiveness or a mixed and complicated historical understanding. This book astounds as does Night, and lingers in the reader's heart and mind like the sincere seeker's warm, alluring smile. Germany fascinates Raphael as Raphael with his humor, intelligence, experience as a child of survivors, the son who has returned to cross a horrifying internal landscape, fascinates Germany. His tale will remind you of the wise mother's response to the nightmare: Make friends with the monster. In this way, Raphael gains the right to call his amazing book, "My" Germany. There has never been a survivor's journey like this one, for he has come to see, to clarify, to know, to fashion for himself the meaning of the twentieth-century's worst tragedy.

This was the book I didn't believe I would read. But being a fan of Lev Raphael's work how could I not?

He is not the first Jewish American with direct connections to the Shoah who I have known to have reluctantly gone to Germany and discovered there a healing experience.

Germany is the country I had looked down upon literally as I flew to Israel from the states as a teenager, and thought of as a shadowy land of forgotten ghosts and unknown graves.

College Jewish friends and I avoided talking about WW II with students from Germany, and even emotionally questioning one another when the Germans were out of earshot why we were feeling shy? Their country had caused the problem! I spoke up when the Berlin Wall was coming down, and shocked a group in Arizona, that I didn't care if the wall ever came down.

Having heard and read so many intimate stories of the Nazi atrocities and of their many sympathizers and as told from not only better known survivors but also several neighbors and having seen as many movies, the documentaries, how much more horror could I absorb?

Yet I wanted to know what Lev experienced and he tells us in his matter-of-fact manner that I've come to enjoy. I was pleasantly surprised what an easy read it was, and though there are moments that I had to pause, reflect on the terror, I was also amazed by his journey. His story is enlightening, cathartic, redemptive, controversial, joyous, and humorous too. There are moments in this read where I also found myself laughing out loud.

Lev like myself had dismissed German products even though I presumed they were better quality, and I had originally felt incredibly guilty with a Krups coffee maker until learning George Krup wasn't the same as the munitions people. I was the person responsible for having Tutima watches pulled off shelves in Chicago until they changed their public relations as NATO's timepiece rather than that of the Luftwaffe. Germany probably will never be one of my places to visit list. But having read of Lev's experience, I will now begin to work through my distaining attitudes about the German's. Although some of their stuffy mannerisms, I'll probably continue to poke fun of as I do every other including my own.

At a book reading several years ago the founder of the Jewish Book Fair told an audience in Chicago that there wasn't anything new to be written about the Holocaust, although Joseph Skibell's novel "Blessing on the Moon" was a new discovery for her at that time. Several years later I believe she might say now that Lev's Raphael has created new lenses to examine the after shocks of the Shoah.

Readers can appreciate Lev's odyssey, perhaps vicariously if they so choose, and reflect, examine long held attitudes towards Germany. Lev exposes himself to antagonisms from sectors of the very community that he longed to be a member, and that he has always been a member. The epilogue reports an incident, a comic tragedy, the aftermath of a book reading and from those won't accept his new found discovery and his peace of mind with contemporary Germany.

This is a story of discovery and transformation and of a courageous man willing to take on the haunting of his family's past.

I savored this book until the very last page and even then, was sorry to put it down. This is a marvelous memoir, weaving a tapestry of multigenerational tragedy and survival, with acute and fascinating observations about the impact of history on the author's parent's lives, as well as his own. Much of their truth had been hidden from him as a child. Raphael has written a memoir that reads much like a contemporary mystery. You never know where the story will lead as he uncovers layer upon layer of his mother's past, culminating with the brutal reality of her experience at the hands of the Nazis. Raphael chronicles his own journey as a Second Generation Jewish writer coming to terms with his Jewishness, his sexual identity, and with Germany --the Germany of his parent's experience as well as his own. I couldn't recommend this memoir more highly.

Lev Raphael, the author of eleven books of fiction [including a mystery series], has this time penned a memoir with the sub-title "A Jewish Writer Returns to the World His Parents Escaped.' Reduced to its essentials, that is the basic subject matter of this sometimes harrowing but most affecting book, which is an embodiment of the exhortation to 'never forget' [what is argued should be the "614th commandment" of observant Jews].

The book recounts an indescribable time in human and personal history, literally indescribable for many, if not most, of those who were there and who survived the Holocaust. The author states "I've always had to acknowledge that you can't force someone to relive catastrophe." And because that was so, it is mostly up to the generations that came after to attempt it, the Second Generation and perhaps those to follow, if that is still possible. Mr. Raphael, a member of that Second Generation, in whose household Germany and anything in any way related to anything German was forever tainted, was persuaded to travel there on book tours when his books were translated into that language, a journey sometimes horrific but also fascinating [to the reader] and enlightening [to the author].

This memoir recounts the grotesque histories of the lives of the author's parents, the horrors faced both inside and outside of the concentration camps. Searching faces in old photographs of a place where he knew his grandfather had been, thinking "Weren't all these men my grandfather?" Bits of stories he remembers, that "slipped into my life like an unseen cat that suddenly springs to slash your hand. They didn't happen to me, yet they're mine now, or at least what I can remember of them. And so they live inside of me . . . " It would have been impossible for him to imagine the impact that actually being in Germany would have on him, as indeed that reaction was at first- - but only at first - - difficult to imagine for this reader. I hasten to add that this is not an unrelentingly depressing book. It is an important one in the annals of Holocaust literature.

The memoir, wonderfully written and diligently researched, so vividly describes the emotions stirred before, during and following Mr. Raphael's trips to Germany and other countries where his parents had lived, been interned, met and survived, that the reader cannot help but be stirred to many of those same emotions. I could not put the book down, and it is highly recommended.

How can one forgive the unforgivable? That's a question many wrestle with, perhaps none more so than Holocaust survivors and their families. Should the children and grandchildren of those who perpetrated such great horrors be held responsible for the actions of their forebears? Lev Raphael, one of the first authors to write about the Second Generation (Holocaust survivors' children), takes us on his own journey from viewing Germany through his parents' eyes to viewing the country through his own. As Raphael's story and family history unfold, the reader learns of the history of Raphael's parents. Their lives before the war. Surviving the horrors of concentration camps and slave labor. And afterwards, when they meet in a displaced persons camp, marry, and build a new life together. As he grows into adulthood, his parents' fear and loathing of Germany and all things German becomes his own.

Raphael must confront those feelings head-on when he travels to Austria and Germany in 2005 to promote a translated version of his book The German Money. Over a period of two weeks, Raphael's experiences change his view of the people who reside in Germany and Austria today. Told as only Lev Raphael can, through well-crafted prose and witty turns of phrase, we watch as he transcends old prejudices and forms new friendships and a new relationship with the country. Powerfully written, Lev Raphael's book presents a moving story about coming to terms with the past and developing a richer, deeper understanding of his parents and what they suffered through. In the end, Raphael frees himself to experience and relate to Germany as it is today, and not as it was once upon a time.

MY GERMANY is not an easy book to read for anyone whose family or friends were touched by the Holocaust. But it's a triumph, nonetheless, because Lev, whose parents were Survivors, is able to make peace with it. For that reason alone, it would be worth reading. But there are many other reasons to read it. The prose reads almost like one of his mystery novels, as he pieces together the truth of his parents' pasts from disparate clues and writings. The anguish he feels trying to balance his love of Jewish observance with the recognition that he is gay brought tears to my eyes. Above all, though, his joy and hope, after successfully battling his demons, is uplifting. What a great read!